Red Dwarf XI and XII announced today...

Good news. From what is saw of Red Dwarf X, it was a lot better than i expected.
 
Mixed emotions really: back of my mind I'm thinking "flogging a dead horse" aka "Only Fools and Horses"

But then again even a poor RD, is still head & shoulders above most of the current dross of TV these days
 
Interested to see how this goes - Red Dwarf post Series V is somewhat of a mixed bag to me nowadays, though I loved every series to bits as a kid. Still have a lot of fondness for the show, though. Series X definitely seemed like a step in the right direction in many ways, but its troubled production and scripting process was pretty evident - particularly in Entangled which had a strong first half but tailled off due to the second half being rewritten completely at the last minute, and in Dear Dave which had chunks (including and entire subplot) filmed on a green-screen and added during post-production - from watching the Blu-ray extras, it's amazing this episode even made it to screen at all!

Red Dwarf never seems to have had a particularly smooth ride production-wise, but Series X took it to whole new levels. I know I wasn't the only one worried that Doug Naylor taking on both sole writing duties along with both the director and producer roles was giving him too much of a load to bear. Thankfully, it sounds like a separate production company is involved for XI and XII, which should hopefully take some of that burden off his shoulders and allow him to focus on polishing the scripts as much as possible. He's mentioned on Twitter that he started drafting ideas for new scripts not long after Series X was completed, so with the delays since then you'd hope there's been more than enough time to refine his ideas into something solid...!

I do wonder if the two scripts which got dropped from Series X - apparently due to the amount of location work required - will make it into either of the new series in some fashion. if memory serves Dear Dave and The Beginning were written to replace these, hence the former being a bottle show that was unfinished even at the time of filming, the latter cribbing several ideas from one of the Red Dwarf movie treatments. I'm also pretty sure (from memory) that neither replacement script contains any references to the search for Kochanski, which I'm pretty sure is mentioned in most if not all of the first four episodes of the series - presumably as buildup to the intended finale. I seem to recall it being mentioned that the discarded episodes were set to bring the arc of Lister's search for Kochanski (which began in Back to Earth) to a close in some fashion, so if Doug Naylor's looking to keep it as just the "Boys from the Dwarf" as per Series I-VI then it may be that he doesn't choose to revisit these ideas. If that's the case, then hopefully he'll at least detail what was planned at some point, as I'd be interested to know what the originally intended climax of Series X was!
 
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How good is this! Oh my great good gosh! I am excited to see where it goes, the only let down so far for me was the 3 part special they did before X
 

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